We are all about brews and books …

Alcohol – The social Glue

One wears super hero T-shirts, the other one drools when he talks — and he talks a lot, often yaps for hours, almost as if, he has never seen his frothy lips in the mirror, and as if, no one has ever told him, that it is almost impossible to draw logic, if surprisingly there is one, coming out of his disfigured skeletal jaws.

This first one goes by the name Sam, he wears floral knickers — mostly an inch or two above his pencil jeans, and has cravings for Fattoush, Pistachio and other pretentiously unutterable garbage.

The second one is…well he is not Sam for all I care. He talks and chews gums at the same time. It never helps an unendingly drooling face. Does it? It never has, and one should tell him that. He judges moms who smoke and dads who don’t. He also gawks evidently at all age and shapes of bosoms that traject his sight radius; flat-boards, lemons, melons or mosquito bites — all of them, and then in his slobbery voice, passes judgmental remarks. He sounds corny, mostly for a 5 ft. scrawny motherfucker, who clearly has a lack of dressing-sense, but also because, yes, he drools. A lot!

And then there are those, who never trim their nose hair, walk around in torn pajamas — mostly to piss the elitists off, have pubic hair for beard and sing songs, out of tune on karaoke nights. Then there are girls of a certain category, who use unwaxed armpits, as their chastity belt, but desperate divorced men and unmarried boys still show up on their yards, for milkshakes or otherwise.

So where did I meet these wannabes, and gonnabes and has-beens?

Through friends, and their friends, and their friends — in clubs and pubs, the ones that resemble municipal junkyards, the exteriors of which, smell of ammonia, and if you aren’t careful, you would step on one, or many broken glasses at once.

And what did we do? We smoked and drank and partied. We partied like there’s no tomorrow, and then, when it was already tomorrow, we partied once again and smoked and drank — almost on a loop.

This went on for a good 7-8 months, but someone recently, I don’t know who, I never know who tells me things, told me, that the second guy’s name is Lovely.

“Lovely? The drool master Lovely, you mean? Man, his parents have an amazing sense of humor.” I thought.

So anyway, on the Independence day, you know the day, that this generation can’t even pronounce in Hindi? Yeah, on that day, this Lovely guy, and I don’t mean that as an adjective, invited me and Sam and others, who I only know on a first face basis, assuming they have other faces, over dinner.

Now I am usually the kind of person, who doesn’t have…dinner…on…weekends…after parties. I stuff myself minimally with fries, sometimes with the leftovers from others’ plates and pretend I am on a diet. But I agreed to show up sober, because it was a dry-day on a Friday.

That day, they all looked different, talked differently and even behaved differently. I learned, that the lady, with the widest smile ever, that spreads till her ears — the ears, that are mostly weighed down by the large and heavy golden hoops, and if you could put fire around them, a circus dog would jump right through — was Shreya, a Chartered Accountant. Before that night, I had always mistaken her for a failed Model.

Then there was this ugly girl, who compensates her ugliness on social media, by uploading dozens of trail room profile pictures, in different clothes, that she never buys. I remember her from a picture with Lovely, where both of them are sucking their drunken lips, like ducks and Lovely is posing with a “V” sign, like he won a competition for the best drool-face. As much as I laughed at that, I must admit now, that I have never otherwise, ever seen, a duck-face on a fuck-face.

And then, they all painfully talked, mostly, superficially, about literature and society, and about British colonisation and soccer and whether they wanted to barbeque cottage cheese or not. And it dawned on me, and Sam and Lovely, and others, that it is just the Alcohol and the escapism from the dysfunctional personal lives, that keeps us all together, despite the obvious differences. So after half an hour of fake laughter, two chicken legs, and a bottle of just plain water, I called it a night, only to come back the next time completely drunk.